


death doesn't discriminate

by ctimene



Category: Daredevil (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: A character study that grew a plot, Angst, Emotions, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, I will be updating these tags with each chapter, Karen-centric, Multi, Murder, One-Sided Relationship, Post-Season/Series 02, Rough Sex, The comfort is limited, Unless I forget, With A Twist
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-13
Updated: 2017-08-28
Packaged: 2018-12-14 13:11:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11783850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ctimene/pseuds/ctimene
Summary: Karen starts writing Matt’s obituary in her third month at the Bulletin.Not Defenders compliant. Not even a little bit.





	1. between the sinners

**Author's Note:**

> Look at the warning! Look! And content note for: Mentions of death, off-page violence, me trying to make you cry.
> 
> I'm sorry, guys. I just wanted to puzzle out Karen's extremely odd journalism career. Take comfort in the fact that Defenders will make this an AU quicker than you can say I'm not looking for super friends.

Karen starts writing Matt’s obituary in her third month at the _Bulletin_.

Ellison’s moving her around a lot, training her on the job — a few weeks in features, a month with the politics team — because she’s good, very good, better at this than anything she’s ever done before, but that doesn’t get her over the hump of no degree, no experience. She butts heads with a lot of people — Katherine, the chief reporter, Mollie, on investigations, Fred, the office busybody, all of whom have a decade of experience on her each.

Eventually, she learns to play nice, but none of them, especially Karen, forget that she’s a snarling hound beneath the smiles. It’s… different to her old job. God, Matt and Foggy thought she was so _nice._

She chafes in features, pitches a new investigation to Ellison every week and keeps digging on the most promising leads while trying to drum out copy on Pepper Potts’ new ‘single and ready to mingle’ wardrobe. It’s as close to writing about superheroes as she dares to get, for all that it could be her beat if she went toe-to-toe with Jennifer. But for now just thinking about heroes, vigilantes, anything from the Accords to the Cage business stops the words in her head until she has to slam her hands on the desk and take a lap around the newsroom to cool off.

She’s furious with Matt, obviously. Foggy too; she promised to stay friends, sure, before she knew he was lying to her face for months, encouraging her to feel — _whatever_  she felt for Matt — when he knew. She tells him as much, the first time he gets her to come for a drink after work, flush with signing bonus cash, and to be fair to him, he takes it with grace. No protestation, no arguing — and Karen leaves as angry as she came, because she wants to fight, grip this lie in her hands and her teeth until she’s pulled out every barb of it in her skin, in Foggy’s, in Matt’s.

(She doesn't — refuses to — think about the other lies. The lies of omission. The gun and Frank and everything that came before New York. Guilt isn't her way. Maybe hypocrisy is, but it's not like there's anyone to call her out on it.)

It’s a good thing, she thinks sometimes, that she’s staying off the superhero beat, because for all it gives her writer’s block, she’s much more afraid of the opposite. She could put Matt’s secret on the front page _tomorrow_. Karen wonders what it says about her that she’s thought about it, viciously, late at night and early in the morning — whenever she catches sight of the photos Foggy helped her hang in the hallway when she moved in, before HCB and the Bulletin and Christmas. _Before_. The three of them in the office, at Josie's, at the fish market, in the park, smiling and lying.

She wonders what it means that Matt didn’t even ask her to keep it secret — that it didn’t cross his mind that she might not. Foggy had, moments before she stormed out, pretending that he didn’t have a reason to ask.

Karen’s angry, so angry, and frightened to work on news and bored of working on features. And then she reaches obituaries. One page, sometimes two, buried at the back of the book between the stock prices and the personals (“God help ‘em, some people in New York are still taking out personal ads. God help ‘em and God love ‘em,” Samuel, the obits editor, says. “They’re the only regular advertisers worth anything.”) Samuel — Samuel, never Sam — reminds Karen of Ben, though he’s loud and a snob and seems a little drunk 80 per cent of the time.

Obits is quiet, though, and _thorough_ , with a lot of emphasis on the craft. The desk is tucked in the quietest corner of the office, next to the clippings library. There's barely enough space for three computers amongst the stacks of paper, notebooks and books piled high — biographies and history and compilations of gossip columns. Samuel and Charlie are both small and practically vanish behind their screens, for all they keep up a rolling commentary on their work, with a shared sense of humour that's as black as tar. Sometimes they’ll dig out an old folder of cuttings to laugh over the catty comments snuck into the obituaries of the rich and fabulous, and a column of dust will shoot across the golden light from their only window. It's easy to see how they get overlooked — how some people on the news beat don't even realise there is an obituaries desk.

At first Karen finds it galling, given how often the section is torn out entirely if something more exciting happens. (“They dropped us for a fucking dog show once,” Samuel tells her on her second day with the desk. “Like pedigree pooches were gonna grab us a Pulitzer. Still, the work experience kid took good pictures, for a high schooler.”) But Samuel and Charlie shrug and get on with things, combing over copy for poor metaphors and inconsistencies for the next day’s paper.

The first piece Samuel gives her is Tony Stark, which is a slight surprise, given Iron Man buzzed the Eiffel Tower last night. “He’s not-” she starts, half a question in her voice, because, come on, she’d get a push notification on her phone if Stark died.

“We can’t wait until people die to write them,” Samuel says, just kind enough to embarrass rather than infuriate her. “This one just needs a quick touch up. Hasn’t been updated since the Battle of New York. There was a full re-write then, excellent work, but the writer-” He stops. “You add what you see fit, the Accords, I’ll look it over. Try to keep the tone- you know what, you know this, give it a whack and see how you go. Ellison said you were good with heroes.”

The metadata says the file was created by BUlrich, last edited by SWeinman. Samuel watches her over his thick-framed glasses and the screen as she flexes her fingers and gets to work.

She could write 3,000 words on Tony Stark since the Incident. On the Mandarin and Sokovia and Captain America and Pepper Potts and Spider-Man and… all of it, the way heroes are changing and either hiding or fighting and in the middle of it is Tony Stark, smiling with too much teeth for the cameras, quipping inside a tin can and looking older every day. She could start writing and never stop, that old fear flooding her for a second — because how far is it to jump from Iron Man to the friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man, from Queens to Hell’s Kitchen and-

But she can’t write 3,000 words. The obit is already 2,400, and that’ll be sliced down if — when — it gets used. Her additions can’t be more than a few paragraphs, a brief pen portrait of the man who’s becoming more like metal — brittle and rusting and wearing away. So Karen swallows her fear, and reads and reads and reads, article upon article, profiles and interviews and accounts, and at the end of the day she’s added 350 words and highlighted 200 that are prime for cutting from the old obit, and Samuel calls it a decent bit of work.

It feels different to other writing. It’s not the fizz of an investigation, the mix of risk and danger and curiosity and righteousness that buzzes in her brain and feels too much like a fix for comfort — but then, when she’s investigating, comfort is the last thing on her mind. It’s not the release of an op-ed either, although there’s a trace of the triumph she feels when she expresses something perfectly, and readers _understand_ and agree. It’s certainly not features, dredging up pep and interest in something that gives her nothing back.

There’s a satisfaction with work well done, but also a deeper sense of pride at- at the justice of it, at doing someone _justice_ , capturing them fairly and squarely with just her words on the page. She wonders, briefly, if this is how Foggy and Matt feel in the courtroom, when they pin down a witness with a few arguments, a clever question. Her face feels like Foggy’s, split with a smile. And fun, too — Tony Stark’s obit is _fun_ , rife with anecdote and innuendo, like the man himself, and reading it had been a joy. Karen’s spent the whole day staring death in the face, and she leaves with more life to her bones than she’s felt in a long time.

By the end of the week she’s frantically fact-checked the obituary of a 102-year-old jazz singer whose death was announced an hour before deadline, updated four more stock obits for the unlikely deaths, and started writing her first, for back-from-the-dead Danny Rand — “Just be glad,” Samuel says, “we didn’t run one for him the first time round. That’s always a pain, having to rewrite from scratch.” Then he relates the smug story of how the _Bulletin_ didn’t run their Stark obit when the _Bugle_ did, and Jameson’s still pissy about it. The Rand one is just a sketch so far, no one expects someone so recently declared legally alive to end up dead, despite all the weirdness around Rand Enterprises, but the narrative’s compelling. Karen can’t stop smiling.

So when she gets back to her apartment — her new apartment, without a rug on the floor to hide the stain and holes in the walls — and the pictures of her and Matt and Foggy lie and smile down from her walls, she's not angry. Her shoulders relax, her throat loosens. She stretches out her hands and her knuckles don't crack with the strain. She knows what she has to do.

 _Some of Matt Murdock’s clients,_ she writes, _called him their guardian angel._  

_The rest of us called him Daredevil._

* * *

A good obituary requires knowledge of its subject. There have been moments — more than moments, long nights finding the bottom of one beer after another — when Karen’s wondered if she ever knew Matt. But then she remembers his face on her shoulder, how gentle his hands were on her wet skin, the sharp force of his laugh. She knew parts of him, at least. And she remembers the twitch of his fingers to his glasses whoever she walked in the room, and raised voices through thin walls, and the calls he never picked up that Foggy always, always would, and thinks that there were parts she didn't want to. Or — and she remembers the smile of that woman in Matt's bed, infinitely more self-satisfied in Karen's memory than reality — she thought she didn't want them, until they were just out of reach.

But nothing's really out of reach, not to a dogged reporter with spunk and guts and gumption and all the other words old men use to say “a woman I respect, when I'm not looking at her legs.”

Foggy looks surprised when she shows up on his doorstep, but he hasn’t moved, for all he can afford it now. She can read between the lines  — he’s the one that called it quits, walked away, but she’s the one who moved on. He’s probably still talking to Matt.

Karen doesn’t really do pleasantries, just walks in when he steps aside and then hovers awkwardly, because Foggy’s still has all his furniture from college, aka, _none_ , so there’s nowhere to put her coat that doesn’t look like it’ll collapse under the weight. Foggy fetches a couple of beers from the fridge without asking.

“I want you to tell me about Matt,” she says, just as he straightens up.

“He’s okay,” Foggy says, fast. “The thing with the bridge looked worse than it was, apparently.”

“The thing with the-” Oh. She remembers. “I thought that was Spider-Man. With the web?” She does the web shooting gesture they’ve all picked up from YouTube, then feels foolish. 

“You mean Spider-Kid? Spider-Toddler? Spider-Embryonic-Heap-Of-Cells? Nah. That was Matt. The footage was bad but I can spot that a- I can spot him a mile away.” Karen suspects the beers they’re holding are the last of a six pack, not the first. “He swings from stuff now. Something to do with his silly club, I don’t know.” He takes a swig and she waits. She’s learnt the value of silence in an interview. “I actually don’t know, I’m not, like, _talking_ talking to him. I just checked in with Claire, but she’s _actually_ not-talking to him — not that I am — so I called and- look, don’t make a face, when did this get so _high school_ , he-”

The value of silence is limited. “Foggy, I don’t care.” He stops short, and the look on his face is shocked, barely less than horrified. “I care that he's okay. That's great, fine, super. But I don't care if you're talking to him, or not talking to him, or passing notes through your barista at Starbucks — it doesn't matter to me.”

Foggy takes a swig from his bottle. “So when you said ‘Tell me about Matt’ that was code for what, exactly?”

“Not code, just- The things I should have known. The things I still don’t. I can’t make sense of it, Foggy, I can’t _understand_ -”

He raises his voice a fraction above hers. “I have it from the horse’s mouth I don’t either-”

Karen goes more than a fraction louder in frustration: “But at least you know him! You know all his stories.”

“I was _there_ for half of them. What do you want, Matt Murdock 101?”

“Yes. That. Exactly that. I want to hear it straight for once.”

Foggy takes a breath, and she knows, somehow, that between the inhale and the exhale is where she’ll win or lose this one, so she holds his gaze, steady and true, and when he breathes out it looks like a sack of potatoes dropped off his shoulders. “Straight, huh? Well, there’s your first misconception about Matthew Michael Murdock.”

It’s not until he’s walking her the three feet to the door at two in the morning, after he’s offered to call her a cab and she’s reassured him she’s not afraid of the dark and the streets and the city, not any more, that he asks, “So, what are you working on at the _Bulletin_ at the moment?”

And she doesn’t think about it, answers thoughtlessly, “Obituaries.”

“Ah,” he says, and it’s been six hours since she knocked on his door and made him start talking, but it’s only now he looks tired. Tired and sad.

It's not just Foggy that she grills, of course, though she couldn't have started without him. She goes to St Agnes and writes a piece about New York’s last orphanage that will never run in the _Bulletin_ , too thoughtful and philosophical, with no news hook whatsoever, but that she tentatively shops around some of the NY literary scene until _New York Magazine_ takes it on. She half expects to hear from Matt after it prints, but either he's not following her stuff or doesn't realise what it means, because there's no confrontation.

She digs through old issues of the Columbia student newspaper for any mentions of Matt. There's a piece about a debate competition that's as dry and dull as it sounds, and a slightly more promising article on accessibility issues where Matt's answers to the clueless interviewer are just short of hostile.  

Karen goes to Fogwell’s under the cover of a story on the revival of boxing for self-defence. She wears a different, thick perfume and goes in the early morning, when Matt should be working, or sleeping off his midnight adventures, but there's still a skip in her heartbeat as she scans every corner. She's prepared to let Matt occupy her thoughts — the same room is a different matter. But he's not there. There's a peeling poster of Jack Murdock’s last fight on the wall and she photographs it carefully, wonders if Matt even knows it's there.  

The old-timers and newbies are keen to talk between practice bouts. One guy remembers the Creel fight, and the fallout — a gym with a cloak of silence thicker than the dust on the lockers. He shuffles from foot to foot at first, squares his shoulders against her questions, but Karen knows when to smile and laugh and when to call bullshit, and she gets him to talk about the mobsters who’ve forgotten the gym was ever there, who moved onto more lucrative sports years ago. And she gets him to talk about the boy who used to do his homework within spitting distance of the ring, but never got in it — until now, she adds to his sentence, and he looks at her appraisingly.

“You know Matty?”

“Yeah,” she says, and it’s less of a struggle. She’s starting to.

They try to get her in the ring, and when she declines, says she prefers not to let attackers get close enough to punch, one of the women slips her a flyer for a self-defence class at a dojo nearby, just in case. She gets her feature in the Saturday paper entirely by accident while trying to explain to Ellison why her lunch break stretched to two hours, and she has to book it to the dojo so it’s not painfully obvious to anyone (Matt; Foggy) what she’s doing.  

(Karen gets into the Thursday class purely on the promise of good publicity, but Colleen Wing doesn’t make a show of it — just teaches a class that’s heavy on the basics, right up until the sword comes out. Her answers for the feature are just this side of stilted, but her students are enthusiastic enough to carry her through.) 

She interviews police officers at the scene after Daredevil sightings (beatings); she tracks down her fellow hostages and only gets a few doors slammed in her face; she reads every article, blog post, every frigging tweet about Daredevil, tracks his patrols across the city, and only just stops short of a wall of stalking when she remembers how large the damage deposit was on her new apartment.

By the time she's done researching she's filled a notebook with interviews and half lines, and she's got a stack of features and exclusives almost as thick. 

Karen writes it on a cheap netbook bought for the purpose. She never connects it to the internet, installs the office’s encryption software, and when she’s done she saves it on a new, protected memory stick and smashes the laptop to smithereens. 

Well. She makes one stop before its appointment with a hammer and the docks. 

* * *

Foggy's new place isn't that much bigger than his old, but it's lovely, full of light and white walls and closet space to die for. She tells him as much and he laughs. Then, apropos of nothing, he says, “I haven't told Matt where I've moved. That I've moved. It felt like, you know, I've drawn a line. A totally artificial line, but like- it's weird, isn't it? It's weird. I shouldn't be thinking about stuff like this so much. About him so much. Isn't that the point?”

“Maybe. But, you know, it's not as if any of us is being normal about this. Case in point, this,” she adds, as she hands across the laptop. Foggy snorts.

“Excellent point. And, hey, I guess if he wants to find me he can always sniff me out.”

“Or listen for your heart,” she jokes, but it lands a little awkwardly, and Foggy only manages a wan smile. A pause stretches into a silence, and then Foggy opens the single file bang in the centre of the desktop and sighs.

Karen snoops while Foggy reads her work with a glass of whisky in his hand, and the bottle not far off. There are a couple of bottles — full, unopened — in the kitchen, and she raises a questioning eyebrow, and then clears her throat when it's clear Foggy’s engrossed in the laptop.

“Mmm? Oh, clients. Plenty of high functioning alcoholics require the services of HCB. Low functioning too. This bit about the fight, Battlin’ Jack, it's great, who'd you talk to for that?”

“Trade secret,” she says, pouring herself a glass and wandering away, across the sitting room and down the short hall to the bathroom — gleaming blue tiles — and the bedroom. She wants, needs, Foggy's opinion on the piece — his approval, maybe — but she's not sure she can bear to see his reaction to it, line by line. So instead she slips off her shoes to enjoy the plush carpet, and cranes her neck out of the window for the view, and tries to identify Foggy's relatives in the pictures on the night stand.

She's sitting on the bed, trailing her toes across the weave of the bright red rug, the only bit of the room that screams Foggy, when he appears in the doorway. His eyes are red-rimmed, the glass hangs empty from his finger tips. Foggy’s always been a large presence in a room, had to be alongside Matt, but now he _looms_. It's new and different and Karen's somewhere between excited and ashamed to have cut so deep.

In a split second, she imagines kissing this Foggy, so heavy and frantic with all he’s going to lose. She wonders if, inconsiderate with their mutual misery, he'd grip her wrists in one hand, how his weight might push her thighs apart on his bed, on his plush rug.

Then he clears his throat, and Karen snaps out of her fantasy, remembers he's sad, and that most girls, nice girls, don't find emotional turmoil a turn on.

 _“Elektra Natchios,”_ he quotes, a tone or two lower than usual, _“was the unquestionable love of his life.”_ A harsh breath out from him, and she inhales, and they're five feet apart but it might as well be inches. “Now, Karen, who are you trying to hurt with that line? You? _Me?_ Because it can't be her, she's dead, and it can't be Matt because he will-” He stops.

“It's just true, isn't it?” she replies, and she's not surprised by the bitterness in her tone, even if she'd like to be above it. “Maybe if he had time to get over her, but come on, Foggy-”

“Don't-”

“We both know he's gonna end up dead before-”

“Karen-”

“I'm sorry, Foggy, but if you're holding out for Matt, you're waiting for a dead man. For a ghost.” The weight of the silence after her words hangs heavy around her ears. “You missed your shot. I never had one.”

“That’s not true,” he says, but he offers nothing in evidence.

“Why do you think that?” Her anger is sudden, but it doesn't take either of them by surprise. “Why did you try to push us together?”

“Oh, come on, I barely tried, you did that by yourselves.”

“But you encouraged it.”

“Of course I did! Because you were both cute and into each other and I like my friends to be happy, astonishingly, because I am not the world’s biggest asshole.”

“And what about you?” 

“What about me?” he blusters, but she’s onto the crux and won’t be dissuaded. “What, our one date? I’m not your type, Karen. I’m nobody’s type when Matt’s in the room.” 

It’s a ridiculous thing to say, soggy with self-pity, and it might be true but it sets her teeth on edge. Still, she also knows that the moment she rises to it, this fragile truce will snap. So instead she puts her shoes back on, takes four deliberate steps across the room, and says, “You should give yourself more of chance, Foggy. You could have given me one.” And it’s still a little acid, and he cringes, and it’s hard, as she slips past him in the doorway, not to flinch in anticipation of what she always expects from the men who want her — violence, a hand, an insult.

But it’s Foggy. Foggy, who she loves and might have fallen in love with, if he’d let her, so he lets her go, and Karen tucks her laptop under her arm and walks out with her head held high, and can only mildly congratulate herself on not being a bitch about it. She takes out her frustrations on the laptop at the dock, throws the pieces into the water so they splash up spray against her ankles.

The next morning Foggy sends her a text, _I'm sorry for yelling,_ followed by too many emojis for a 33-year-old professional, and though some of the chill in her gut lifts Karen can't shake the feeling that, once again, she's fucked up her opportunity for something better. She's always thought it was a cheap consolation, to keep someone's friendship.

Karen starts writing Matt's obituary in her third month at the _Bulletin_. She finishes it in her sixth, the same day she gets an exclusive interview with Danny Rand, a full time staff job and a title bump. She locks the memory stick in a safety deposit box and tries not to think about how many years (months) it'll be before she needs it. Before Matt needs it.

She never imagines that Foggy will need one first.


	2. and the saints

Karen’s finally back on news, digging into some of the background on Rand’s supply chain, when the desk gets a call. Jakob, a Hungarian with a voice that carries, picks up.

“Uh-huh. When? You got a name? Seriously? No, wait, Castle case, I remember.”

Karen’s at the watercooler, talking to Tom, the handsome office guy, but her ears prick up and she checks her phone for one of Frank’s cryptic texts. There’s nothing, and she lets herself relax. Jakob puts down the phone, tells Kadhim to make another call, and she goes back to chatting about _Game of Thrones._

Half a minute later Jakob calls across the newsroom to Ellison: “There’s been a stabbing at Ryker's. Guy’s dead. Lawyer.”

 _Castle case._ Her hand tightens on her plastic cup. Water sloshes over white knuckles. Karen thinks of a memory stick she put in a bank lockbox not long enough ago at all. _Matt_.

“Anything more?” asks Ellison, gruff.

“Yeah, it’s one of the guys from the Castle case. Fisk case too. Foggy Nelson.”

Karen almost puts her hand through Katherine’s miniature succulent when she shoves a hand onto her desk for support. From very far away she hears Kadhim chime in: “Dead on arrival at Union General, but next of kin may not know yet. Cops haven’t named him officially.”

Katherine appears at her elbow and steers her towards the restroom. Inside, she leans against the door to hold it fast.

“Go home,” she says, blunt as always.

“I know him-”

“I know. And the newsdesk will remember soon enough and stop yelling about it if you stay, which they shouldn’t, because it’s news and they need to do their jobs, so go home.”

Karen’s knees are shaking. She’s half sitting in the sink and her shirt is getting damp and cold and her knees won’t stop shaking. “I could help.”

“Don’t. Go home.” Katherine tuts, impatient. “I get it, you’re young, but no one is gonna ask you to martyr yourself over this. We don’t need you to. If you have to, give me his full name, his date of birth, if you know it. It’s nothing we won’t find out, but it’ll speed things up. Otherwise, there’s nothing we need from you. We can handle this. Go home.”

She nods, tentatively, and Katherine matches it. “I’m very sorry for your loss,” she says, and means it, though the note of exasperation doesn’t leave her voice. “You need me to call you a cab?”

Karen shakes her head. “No. It’s not far. I’ll walk.”

She makes it half a block in stunned silence. Half a block without a single other person on the street, without a peep of traffic, just her heels echoing between the sidewalk and the buildings either side.

Half a block from the office, heading away from her apartment, and the click of her heels stutters and she reels into a doorway, crowds and cars and colour and clamour blowing past her as fat, ugly sobs cram up her throat into her mouth. They break over her face, wet squalls, and when she tries to cover her eyes she finds her hands won’t let go of the strap of her bag, dug in like claws.

And still the sobs well up, and it should be impossible, because where they’ve come from, the pit of her stomach, is empty, a sucking vacuum, a hole where the gap in the world has ripped an echo inside her, just to make its point clear.

She’s not sure how long she stays there. Long enough that her throat aches and her eyes dry and sting, but not so long that someone notices, stops, inquires. But then, this is New York. What’s one cry in a city of sirens?

She gets her feet moving under her again, and she’s not sure where she’s walking except _away_ , until she ends up in front of the sign. Too much effort to take it down, she guesses, but just the sight of NELSON, in that proud font she picked out, sends fresh tears slipping down her face.

Karen still has her key. It’s Matt’s way, she’s thought before — to let people go, drive them off, even, but leave them the means to come back. Leave the choice in their hands.

Everything is exactly as it was on the stairs, the landing, but the offices are different.  Here again, a stunning emptiness — the hole inside her squeezes and expands in recognition, and though she knows that Foggy packed his stuff in boxes and took it in a cab to HCB, part of her feels like he was ripped away from this space, their space, right as the knife-

Stupid, she thinks forcibly, stupid, Ryker's is a jail, it would have been a shank, not a knife-

She bends, clasps her hands to her knees for a moment of silent screaming, holds herself tight and together as she casts around for something, anything else to think about.

There’s a spot of colour visible through the patterned glass of Matt’s office door. Something bright on his old desk — maybe his current desk, although the whole office looks grey and — lifeless, her mind supplies. Unlived in. She forces her attention back to the spot of colour. It’s red, and for a moment she’s furious — anyone could come in and discover the secret Matt nearly died to keep from her — but, no. She slips through the door and finds a dinosaur. Bright red plastic, a little soft to the touch, safe for children to gum at and hurl at each other. The hole twists again, her breathing runs ragged, and she has to press her hand, still grasping the stupid toy, against her mouth to keep her heart from falling out.

There's a sound on the stairs, a scuff. No tapping of a cane, but it has to be Matt — this office clearly hasn't seen a client in a while. Karen moves quickly, out of Matt's office to her own — her _old_ — desk. There's a fresh panic to her movements as she realises with horror she’s made herself the bearer of bad — terrible, appalling — news.

But then Matt walks through the door, wearing a grey suit and a greyer face, and it's clear he knows. There's blood on his knuckles, red and welling up, and on his suit, an ugly brown patch.

“Karen?” he asks, and it shouldn't be a question — he can tell it’s her and she knows it — but it doesn't raise her hackles. Everything is in question.

“Matt,” she says, and embarrassingly that's all she can manage before the violent sobs start up again. Matt crosses the room in three sure steps and she folds herself into him, face on his shoulder. He's solid as a rock, but thrumming, like the thick buzz around a generator in summer. His arms are wrapped around her, unmoving, and she wishes he would stroke her hair, and resents that he doesn’t, that she doesn’t have the words to ask.

“You heard. The paper?” he guesses, but doesn't wait for an answer. “It was Fisk.” She nods, because it's obvious, and too awful to say. “He called me in, asked to see me.” Matt was _there_. She didn’t know she had room left in this maelstrom of feeling for pity, but it overwhelms her. And then she remembers: there’s blood on his suit.

“I thought he might- I knew it was a power play, but I thought he might let something slip. Accidentally.” His voice is thick and dead.

“His heartbeat,” Karen supplies, without reproach. It's not like he's had a lot of opportunities to be honest with her lately. And it must be hard, trying not to lie while concealing the truth. Still, she takes a step back, wraps her arms around herself.

Matt continues like he hasn't noticed. Christ, it's like he's trained every muscle to lie. She envies him. “Yes. But- he was in control the whole time. Of himself. Of the situation. Of the jail. He must have had Foggy brought- so I'd be there. He laughed.”

“They call him the Kingpin,” Karen murmurs.

Matt turns his head towards her. “Who told you that?”

“A source,” she replies, just as sharp. But the word sparks a thought, pushes her into action, and she digs through the drawers of her old desk for a legal pad and a pen.

“What are you doing?”

“Taking your deposition. Or doing an interview, whichever makes most sense, I guess. You were there-”

“I couldn't get to him. I tried- I heard- Foggy was screaming. I tried to leave but the guard fumbled the lock. Several times.” Matt’s standing still, but full of coiled tension, and for her own sanity she drags him to a chair, pulls up another to sit opposite him. His knee starts bouncing and somehow that’s more comforting. She tries not to look at the blood. She fails.

“It’s okay, Matt.” It’s really, really not. “How long did it take to get out of the room?”

“Almost two minutes, I'd guess.”

“How good is your internal clock?”

“Good.”

She pauses, pen on the pad. “Could the guard hear the screams?”

Matt swallows. “He pretended not to, but yeah. We could all hear the screams.”

It's a long process, taking evidence. She hammers out the details with Matt, and with each question she tightens her hold on herself, pushes down her grief into a box until she can ask about blood, and the number of gunshots that took the attacker down, and when, exactly, Foggy's heart stopped beating. Matt's crying and there are tears running down her face as well, but with a strange detachment she just scrubs her sleeve across her face and shifts her pad to stop it getting smudged.

“The blood on your jacket-”

“I slipped.” Matt sounds like dead wood yawning in a storm. “They rushed me out through the same hallway. It was everywhere.” He’s said that already.

“Through the crime scene?”

He almost smirks. “Like they weren’t even trying.”

“Were there cameras, where it happened? Wait, sorry, that was stupid-”

“Yes.” Matt cuts her off. “I can hear them. They drone.” A wrinkle appears between his brows. “It was different there. Two separate circuits.”

“Two cameras?” Multiple angles would be good, if they can get hold of the footage.

“Two sets of cameras.”

She writes that down. Underlines it. Ryker's doesn’t have the funding for a second set of cameras.

“When did the attacker die?” is the next question with an interesting answer. Matt thinks for a long time, long enough that tendrils start to escape her tight box of feelings, fill her gut with dread and guilt as she reads over what she’s written and imagines — the recognition of a heartbeat ( _how do you recognise a heartbeat when it beat faster for you?_ she doesn’t ask), the shouts, the screams, the smell of blood. The taste of it.

“He didn’t,” Matt says, finally, when Karen’s started to scratch at the skin on her left wrist to keep herself grounded. “He was still alive when they took him to hospital.”

She has her phone in her hand and is calling Brett in an instant. It takes three tries to reach him. He sounds tired. “I can’t give you a comment, I _won’t_ give you information-”

“Brett, it’s Karen-”

“I know, Page. You get the courtesy of me picking up. Nothing else.”

“Brett, the guy, the prisoner, is he alive? Guarded?”

“Guy was shot seven times, Page, if he’s alive there’s no justice in the world. He’ll have a guard from Ryker's, and police, if he’s still breathing.”

“You need to make sure they’re your guys, Brett, people you trust. This is premeditated, this was planned, we need him alive, we need him to _talk_ -”

“Page, last I checked you were not my boss.” He sighs, heavy. “I’ll make some calls. It’s not my precinct, but- Look, I gotta go, I’m driving, I can’t get into this.”

“Where are you driving?” she asks, on instinct, purely curious.

“New Jersey. Foggy's family.” His voice breaks on the final syllable and he hangs up abruptly. She sits in stunned silence for a second as Matt visibly hesitates before speaking.

“You can’t run an investigation by yourself.”

“Why not?!” She explodes out of her chair, towers over him for a moment, before she stalks off to the other end of the office. “I need to do something. Don’t pretend for a second you wouldn’t be putting on a mask right now — or are you waiting until it’s night? Sneak into the hospital, find the room-”

“No!” Matt shouts, and she glares at him, disbelieving. Obviously, it has no effect. “No,” he says again, quieter, and she looks for the lie in his face and can’t find it. “I don’t… have a plan. I don’t know what to do.” His face hardens. “I was wrong. You should investigate this. _Safely_ , stay _safe_ , Karen, please-” she nods, agrees with a wordless sort of groan, because she won’t leave him “-but find who did this and _tell me._ ”

And I’ll kill them goes unsaid.

“Okay,” Karen lies. She lies for two reasons. One, Foggy would never have wanted Matt to become a killer. Two, she’s a better shot.

She doesn’t know if he hears the lie or something else, but Matt cracks, drops his face into his hands and weeps loudly. Her skin itches with the need to comfort him, with the resentment that she has to.

“Come on, Matt,” she murmurs. “Let’s go home.” He nods, rises, follows. In the street he takes her hand like she has to guide him, like she doesn’t know, and she squeezes hard enough to bruise.

At his place, he doesn’t have to ask her to stay. He changes out of his bloodstained clothes. They sit in silence, and she scrolls through Twitter, looking for any mention of Ryker's.

“Unknown Number,” Matt’s phone chirps. He picks up after the first ring and the sound of whoever’s on the far end makes him shoot to his feet, head into the bedroom and draw the door closed behind him.

Unsurprisingly, not a lot of people advertise their visits to jail on social media, but one kid, either trying to look tough or who doesn’t give a fuck, has a couple of posts about ‘mad alarms’ at Ryker's, and then an ambulance. The tweets are more than ten minutes apart. It’s not proof of anything, but it is _something_.

The screen door shudders open. “That was Anna,” Matt says, sounding dazed and far away. “Foggy’s mom. Adoptive mom. She wanted to get his spare keys so they can … make arrangements.”

Karen hums a note of glum interest, not following.

“I don't have them,” Matt explains. Then, again, louder, with a hole in his voice: “I don't have them! He asked me for the spare when he moved, I don't even know where his new place is. He didn't tell me.”

She knows that, of course, and part of her — the spiteful, angry slice of her grief starting to curl around her wrists and throat — wants to say _'Did you ask?’._ But. _But._ But then she looks at Matt, properly, how dwarfed he is in a Columbia hoodie that definitely wasn't his own, how his shoulders are too still and tense, not moving with his breathing. His hands are fists. She wonders that once she thought the violence she saw in him was just her imagination, or her id.

“It’s okay.” She stands, crosses to him, and reaches to smooth his hair, cup his face, give him some soft comfort _as a friend_ , but he catches her wrist before she can touch him, grip tight and unyielding. She gasps, a sharp inhale and a breathy exhale, and a light, wanting whisper of his name. “Matt.”

Karen’s fucked her way through grief before. She knows this play.

When he pulls her forward she follows, meets his kiss with matching heat. He slips his other arm around her waist, pulls her closer til there’s nothing but crushed cloth between them, and when he squeezes her wrist she groans into his mouth. It should feel wrong, or uncomfortable, with her tears still drying on her face, stretching the tender skin there, but it doesn’t. She’s half a breath away from saying Foggy’s name, but Matt is too — and on their own terms, if there can be anything on their own terms, it’s overdue.

When Karen remembers this moment, she’ll be able to admit the desperate fever in her own blood, the need to resort to the only way she’s ever survived this before, but for now she thinks of it as a favour, pictures herself as powerful, giving, allowing Matt to unbutton her shirt and unclasp her bra. She lets herself think that she arches her back, presses her breast against his mouth, out of something purer, kinder, than her own panic.

He takes her to bed, just about. She strips off his hoodie in the living room, leaves her shirt and bra behind there, and doesn’t stop touching his skin as they move across the loft. There’s a fresh-ish cut across his shoulder, neatly stitched, and she avoids it entirely, not willing to raise the question, to break off from Matt’s hand dragging across her stomach to the zipper on the side of her skirt.

Just beyond his screen door he presses her against the wall, and she shimmies her skirt off her hips. Matt splits her thighs with his leg as he sucks his way up her collar bone, her neck, to kiss her panting mouth. She gets a hand in his hair as he slides two fingers past her underwear into her, and though her grunt of surprise is muffled against his mouth, his groan as she pulls back, hard, echoes round the room. She lets him kiss her again as he slides his fingers out and in, rubs his thumb over her clit, and it’s not _good_ but it’s good enough. Matt gets his other large hand on her ass, squeezes, and she’s always liked that, always been easy for men for bad manners, and she surges into him, away from the wall.

She ends up lying across the width of the bed, her ass almost hanging off the edge, scrabbling for purchase with her toes as Matt undoes his trousers. She grabs the edge of the footboard as he drags her underwear off her. Behind him the billboard glows white, then red, and he’s cast into glorious silhouette just as he thrusts inside her. He’s got one knee on the bed and one foot on the floor, and the angle’s deep and bruising, and Karen digs her heel into his back until he falls across her, gives her _more._

“Fuck,” Matt says. “Fuck, fuck,” and Karen pretends it doesn’t sound like _Fog_. She turns her head, presses Matt’s face into her neck and arches. Closes her eyes against the roiling in her stomach, the hole in her chest.

She doesn't come, though she's wet and wanting. There's too much panic in her brain, blocking out the release. Matt stops making noise, just breathes, heavy and ragged, as he covers her body with his own and moves faster. With her eyes shut tight she can imagine she's just a body to him, to anyone, seventeen again and just an emptiness to be filled and left. He kisses the side of her face, though, and even though it _hurts_ to be cared for, to care, Karen opens her eyes, turns back to him and kisses him as he spills inside her.

The moment Matt pulls out, she bursts into tears. It shocks her, embarrasses her, and she tries to roll over and curl into a ball. He doesn’t let her, gathers her close instead, and he’s warm and sweaty and alive against her where her hands feel cold. “It’s not you,” she half-wails into his shoulder, and he shushes her, strokes her hair and her back and lets her weep.

“It’s okay, Karen,” he murmurs. It’s not, it may never be - but she lets herself believe him long enough to sleep.

When she wakes in the morning Matt is drying his eyes and it’s easy to kiss him softly, love him softly. This time it's considerate - remembering to roll on a condom, to kiss with lips as well as teeth, Matt holding her hips as she rides him, slow and steady and riding until she comes like closing chord, on and on and on until he's gasping with her.

She should leave, she thinks over her second cup of coffee, watching Matt try to meditate. She should leave, and not brick them both up here with grief. They’re neither of them good at letting go, but they’ve lost too much already to risk this.

She sets down her coffee cup just as Matt lifts his head, zen abandoned, and she has to kiss him to keep from crying.

Work give her the rest of the week off and she drifts through periods of fierce activity, collecting blueprints of Ryker's and names, endless names, of Fisk’s associates both outside and in. She leaves a reckless, furious message for Frank, a list of all the shitty times Foggy tried to help him, her, the whole of New York, and ends with a half-hearted argument that she wants information, not bodies.

When she's not investigating, she's just _not_. She find herself places: Matt's sofa, halfway through Central Park, outside Josie's, and can't retrace her steps easily through the grey fog behind her. At nights, every night, she finds her way back to Matt. He pries her apart with thick fingers and she falls asleep with tears on her face. In the mornings she'll gather him together with soft touches, let him treat her like glass when, really, she's glue.

The funeral is sooner than Karen expected. She remembers the long drag of days between the crash and Kevin’s service, the stupid things she did to fill the hours, as if the funeral would bring a full stop to the horror of her life . . .  It’s sooner than she expected, sooner than she wanted, and when she wakes the morning of, curled round Matt and not sure what to do about his shaking shoulders, the soft noises of crying, Karen knows she has to do better, be better, stronger, not just for Matt but for herself.

She moves slowly through the day, concentrates on each task. Two minutes to make a cup of coffee, two more to brush her teeth. She doesn’t offer to help Matt with his fiddly formal cufflinks, and he doesn’t offer to help zip up her dress. They don’t touch, at all, not skin to skin, but orbit each other as they get ready, keeping a space between them — space for a third. Space for grief. It’s not until they’re outside the church that Matt wraps his hand around her arm, and Karen’s startled until she remembers just how much he has to pretend.

The church — Episcopalian, very High Church — seems to comfort Matt but makes the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. They come to a mutual stop about halfway up the aisle and slink into a pew, behind a row of suits that Karen doesn’t recognise, and who don’t recognise Matt either, even though they all have the whiff of lawyer about them — HCB, she deduces, not Columbia.

There’s an order of service on the seat and Karen starts reading it to Matt. There’s a picture on the front that looks a few years old, Foggy smiling and relaxed somewhere green, grass running off into the distance behind him. There’s a different picture framed at the front — recent, his hair cropped and slicked back, Foggy wearing a suit that fits snugly on his shoulders and a nice tie. It has to be from HCB, and the large gold frame it’s in too — the kind of gesture a large law firm might make, if an employee was murdered on their time. There’s a sour taste at the back of her throat and she wants to dig her nails into the men and women in front of her, in their nice black suits, who never knew him at all.

Matt tenses as she talks him through the second hymn, and she looks up to see a middle-aged Filipino woman approaching them. She has one of those kind faces built for smiling, so her downturned mouth and watery red eyes sit oddly in her face. Matt surges to his feet when it becomes clear she’s heading for them, and Karen follows awkwardly.

“Anna,” he says, and Karen feels like she’s been punched. Foggy’s mom.

“Matty,” she says, so quiet Karen can barely hear her. “I’m so glad you could make it. Please, come sit with us.”

“I-”

“I think Candace would really appreciate it,” she adds, and there’s that thread of steel Foggy would hide in wheedling and jokes. Matt folds before it like paper. “You must be Karen,” Anna says, and all she can do is nod. “My son was very fond of you.” She nods again, and again, faster, and has to press her hand to her mouth to keep from crying. “Yes,” Anna says, absently, and Karen understands that she’s seeing the ghost of a woman, not fully there. “Come along.”

They follow and sit in the second row, with several Nelson cousins who share Foggy’s cheeks, his smile, and Brett, who is in his full formal uniform and won’t meet Karen’s eyes. In front of them are Anna, though she moves back and forth along the church, greeting and thanking people, until moments before the service begins, and Edward, tall and broad and silent, and Candace, who tries to cry quietly but can’t help herself. Beside her, Matt’s crying too, silent, twisting his cane in his hands.

In front of them all: the coffin, next to the horrid HCB picture. Gleaming wood. Six handles. Bronze.

After that, Karen’s not quite sure of herself. The service is, she supposes, lovely — they always are.

On Monday Samuel and Mollie take her out for a coffee. It's an odd combination, obits editor and head of investigations (all of investigations, unless Karen gets her way) but they share a complete intolerance for BS, so Karen's not even got her lid on her americano when they start their pitch.

“We're running an obituary for your friend. Wednesday, maybe Thursday. I'd appreciate your input,” Samuel starts. She nods before she realises how odd it is. Foggy might have been a scion of Hell's Kitchen, but he wasn't famous.

Mollie cuts in before she can voice the question. “We want to establish public interest. Obviously, it’s in the public interest, but that doesn’t mean the public are interested, ya know? Whatever’s going on at Ryker's runs deep, we're going to need something that tugs the heartstrings to make them care. Nelson's our human face, so we really need people to get outraged now, at once.”

“You're running an investigation?”

“Can't not after something like this. Every paper in the city will be.” But she leans forward, eyes glinting. “But we’re going to run it longer, and better, and get to the bottom of it, and remind Ellison that’s what we do better than the click chasers. You’re in at the start on this one, if you want it.”

“If I want it.”

“It's pretty close to home.” Mollie looks her in the eye. “You've already started, haven't you?”

“I think I can prove eight violations of visitor regulations,” she admits with a shrug. Samuel whistles through his teeth and Mollie gives her an appraising nod. “And,” she adds, more hesitant. It's big. It's a gamble. “And I think there are tapes.”

Mollie scoffs. “They're gonna make that footage disappear quick. They won't care if they have to burn down half the jail to get rid of it.”

“Oh, not their cameras. Their cameras are garbage, I'm sure. There's a second set.” Mollie’s smile widens. “I don't know who put them there-”

“SHIELD, maybe, maybe Nazi SHIELD, sounds like them. I know a guy working on the data dump, I'll ask him.” Mollie pauses. “This is going to be messy,” she says, a final warning.

Karen grimaces, tight and waterstained. “I’m in.” Mollie nods and leaves them without another word, and some of the lead in Karen's limbs goes with her, replaced by a fluttering in her veins. Her hands shake. Samuel hands her a handkerchief just as her eyes start to fill.

“So, you loved him?”

She smiles. “Everyone did.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Defenders jossed the hell out of this, huh? I'm glad.


	3. it takes, and it takes, and it takes

When Foggy Nelson took on a case, he also took on a client. The same could be said of most lawyers, but is true only of a few. Early in his too-short career, an elderly woman hired Nelson and his partner for help with a rent dispute. He ended up fixing up her apartment, representing her for free and accepting her advice on his love life. And, after she was brutally murdered, he arranged her funeral.

Though of a seemingly indefatigable sunny disposition, Nelson was familiar with the darker side of New York City. In fact, he liked to stroll through it, taking friends and family on impromptu wanders through the city’s streets in the middle of the night — usually, just after closing time at his favourite bars. Sometimes he ended up at a fishmongers, at others back at his desk. His legal work, he claimed, was aided by long nights and slow mornings.

A lifelong fan of Gilbert and Sullivan, he described himself as “the very model of a modern broke millennial”, somehow always lacking the funds for a nicer apartment or a well cut suit, but never short of cash for another round at the bar and a cab home. He lived his entire life in Hell’s Kitchen and always had an ear tuned to local news. His family was large, tight-knit and enmeshed in the foundations of this city; his network of friends even more so. The day of his funeral, dozens of businesses in the neighbourhood closed early so the owners could attend.

Franklin "Foggy" Percy Nelson was born on May 19, 1984, the son of Edward Nelson, a carpenter and hardware store manager, and Rosalind Sharpe, a lawyer who swiftly discovered that motherhood was not within her formidable array of talents. Instead young Foggy — his nickname, though soon acquired, had several origin stories, each more outlandish than the last — was dandled on the knee of Anna Aquino, a neighbour who soon became his stepmother.

Yet something of his mother’s influence must have remained, because family members recall him taking up cases from an early age. On one occasion he defended his younger half-sister, Candace, from the charge of stealing freshly baked cookies from the counter top. He was able to prove that she was too small to reach the missing prize and that, moreover, her fingertips were not burnt — as his own were. He accepted his punishment with a good grace, until he learnt of the Fifth Amendment. Candace, now 24, is a real estate agent. She and his parents, biological and actual, survive him.

Nelson was the first in his father’s family to go to college, first at NYU and later Columbia Law School, where he characteristically survived brushes with college authorities over illicit substances, underage drinking and alleged plagiarism with a combination of charm, persuasive argument and compelling evidence. The class of 2014 remember well the day a professor’s lecture was transformed into a mock trial, with Nelson moving masterfully from defendant to prosecutor.

Few who studied with Nelson doubted that he would get far, though some believed him hampered by his sympathy for the underdog. “Foggy had the instincts of a shark, he could sense blood in the water, but his morals stopped him biting down,” Marci Stahl, a former classmate and ex-girlfriend, said. "Some people thought that meant he didn't have teeth at all. Then he'd show them otherwise."

However, Nelson was not shortsighted — he walked away from a position at Landman and Zack barely a year before the firm was brought down in the Wilson Fisk scandal, which Nelson himself helped to expose. When he returned to a large firm, at Hogarth, Chao and Benowitz, it was to do pioneering work on vigilantism, laying the groundwork for Luke Cage’s release from prison and defending Jessica Jones after the Wok and Roll noodle incident.

He never married, but often joked about entering into that holy estate with his former legal partner, Matthew Murdock. The pair left Landman and Zack together to form their own firm and were not hindered by self-doubt, taking on their first client less than seven hours after getting their own desks.

Their firm, though young, soon stumbled into something larger than themselves. Several of their earliest cases, seemingly disparate and unconnected, ended with their clients acquitted — and then murdered. Nelson, who took depositions at a desk lined with colourful dinosaurs, found himself at the center of one of the largest crime syndicates this city has ever suffered. Behind the deaths, the threats, the unexpected shadow of violence, stood one man: Wilson Fisk.

Other newly minted lawyers might have turned tail and fled. Instead, Nelson worked to take down a man who twisted his highest ideal — the law — to his own ends. Murdock and Nelson soon triumphed in the Fisk case, which they worked on from three rooms in a dingy walk up, fuelled by beers, determination and an almost reckless fearlessness in the face of intimidation. Though it would eventually fall to Daredevil to keep Fisk behind bars, the work of Murdock and Nelson, revealed in this newspaper, provided the basis for putting him there.

Early success, however, should perhaps have been tempered by caution. According to some, Nelson did not want to take on the defence of Frank Castle, the former soldier who massacred dozens of gang members during the summer of 2016. Reports differ on why Castle chose to apparently ignore the advice of his counsel and change his plea; his dramatic exit from the court, so soon followed by his escape from prison, showed a disregard for everything Nelson held dear in the judicial process.

The dissolution of the Nelson and Murdock firm after their defence collapsed during the Castle case was a significant blow, and though Nelson bounced back professionally, his friendship with Mr Murdock never recovered.

Nelson’s death — he was stabbed repeatedly by an inmate at Rykers who was mistakenly let into the visiting room unsupervised — has been explained variously: as an unfortunate accident, a case of mistaken identity, an unstoppable moment of madness. His tie was stuffed into his mouth. It had all the hallmarks of a mob hit.

By a twist of fate, Mr Murdock was visiting Rykers at the same time as the fatal attack on Nelson, although because of the prison’s otherwise strict security measures he could not comfort his friend as he died.

Franklin “Foggy” Nelson, attorney, was born on May 19, 1984 and died on June 24, 2017, aged 33.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short update, for which I can only apologise. The next part is proving tricky. Hope I do it justice. Thank you for all the feedback and kudos and comments so far, it's a massive encouragement and really helpful. You're wonderful.


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